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The Urban Sharing team is looking for a PhD student to join the team. The appropriate candidate should have the knowledge or capacity to conduct sustainability evaluations, in particular, considering urban sharing organisations. We will focus on relevant global cities engaging in sharing.

The Third International Conference of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI) took place on June 27–30 2018 in Copenhagen. The conference brought together 200 researchers and practitioners from around the globe, who presented on a wide range of topics from Consumer Behavior, Envisioning & Governing Social Change, Culture & Practices, Transitions to Sustainable Lifestyles, Emergent Research Trends, Practice & Education, and Innovation. The Urban Sharing team organised sessions and presented their research at the conference. Find out more!

One important aspect of our project is dissemination of research results. In the July 2018 issue, PhD Researcher Lucie Zvolska was interviewed for the Sharing Cities Magazine. You can read the full text here.

The 5th International Workshop on the Sharing Economy took place in Mannheim, Germany on 28-29 June 2018. The i-share team at Mannheim University, Germany organised the 5th iteration of the conference; the previous Workshop was organised by the Urban Sharing team in Lund. This year, Yuliya Voytenko Palgan, Lucie Zvolska and Steven Curtis presented their research at this year’s sharing event.

The Urban Sharing team works closely with colleagues at the IIIEE, including Kes McCormick and Charlotte Leire, who coordinate the Sharing Cities Sweden national programme. In April, the Sharing Cities Sweden programme hosted its launch event and workshop on 23 and 24 April respectively. Oksana Mont and Yuliya Voytenko Palgan took part in the events, offering insights from the team's most recent mobile research labs.

In April 2018, the Urban Sharing team performed a mobile research lab in San Francisco, USA. The researchers met with representatives from various sharing platforms, city authorities, civic associations and the academic community. They explored the impacts of sharing on the city in terms of its economic, environmental and social effects, the ways in which the City of San Francisco engages with sharing and the degrees to which sharing is accepted and used by the citizens. Check out the corresponding snapshot here.

A new article “Urban Sharing in Smart Cities: The Cases of Berlin and London” has been published as part of Urban Sharing and Sharing and the City projects. The article develops a conceptual framework that specifies the roles that cities play when governing urban sharing: city as regulator, city as provider, city as enabler and city as consumer. The article is open access and it can be downloaded here:

On 7 March 2018, Urban Sharing researchers Yuliya Voytenko Palgan and Jagdeep Singh together with other IIIEE researchers and Malmö City representatives. The mobile lab was organised as a joint effort between Sharing and the City, Sharing Cities Sweden and Urban Reconomy projects at the IIIEE, Lund University.

On 5th and 6th March 2018, Lucie Zvolska from the Urban Sharing team attended the Sharing Cities Shaping Cities symposium held at the Polytechnical University in Milano. She presented the team’s case studies on how sharing is shaped by local governments and urban sharing organisations in three cities: London, Berlin and Malmö.

The International Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE) hosted of the workshop “Evaluating the Sharing Economy in Cities”, which took place workshop took place on 26 February 2018. The event was hosted by Sharing Cities Sweden, a Swedish national programme for the sharing economy in cities, with IIIEE as coordinator. The Urban Sharing research team participated as part of their ongoing work. Find out more about the workshop!

Professor Oksana Mont, Andrius Plepys, Yuliya Voytenko and Lucie Zvolska of the Urban Sharing team undertook mobile research lab (MRL) in London 12th-17th November 2017. The aim of the MRL was to observe, explore and experience the sharing environment in London.

On the success of the 4th International Workshop on the Sharing Economy, it is with great pleasure we announce a call for papers for a Special Volume of the Journal of Cleaner Production with focus on the Sharing Economy. We invite you to submit your work and spread the news about this special volume. Please note the short time for submitting the full papers – 1st December.

In conjunction with the 4th International Workshop on the Sharing Economy, the Urban Sharing team hosted an opportunity for PhD students to study the collaborative economy in Copenhagen. This International Mobile Research Lab combined classroom activities with real-world exploration of the sharing and collaborative and sharing economy in Copenhagen, in particular, in the fashion and mobility sectors.

On 15-16 June 2017, the 4th International Workshop on the Sharing Economy took place in Lund. The workshop was arranged by the IIIEE together with the department of urban planning and environment at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), and attracted nearly a hundred participants from around the world.

Is the future of sustainable urban transport increased car sharing in cities? Steven took part in a session at the IIIEE Alumni Network Conference in May, where he presented recent findings from Berlin that challenged our notion of car sharing and sustainable transport. The session was organised by Ella Rebalski, Researcher at RISE Victoria. Further inputs were provided by Christian Brandt (Executive Director of OGO Car Share Co-op in British Columbia, Canada) and Brayton Noll (Recent MESPOM Graduate).

We are living in an increasingly urbanising society with real challenges, and opportunities, for future urban spaces to meet the needs of their people. This context set the discussions in motion during "The Urban Planet", which took place on May 18, 2017 and sought to elevate a discussion around Smart Cities, Urban Living Labs (and more broadly, collaboration in cities for sustainability), and new ways of organising urban systems. Team members Yuliya Voytenko Palgan and Steven Curtis were on hand to present their research.

In early April, the Urban Sharing team and a group of five Master's students descending on Berlin. Our goal: to embed, map, understand, investigate, probe, interview, experience, observe everything and anything relating to the sharing economy. So, over the course of five days, we conducted 20 interviews that ranged from sharing organisations, municipal agencies, NGOs, and professional associations.